Ellie Mesler carefully scoops cheese curds into molds as she makes chevre from the milk of the goats that she raises at her Milton home on Monday April 16, 2012. / EMILY McMANAMY, Free Press

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Ellie Mesler raises goats at her Milton home for chevre and other hard cheeses on Monday April 16, 2012. / EMILY McMANAMY / Free Press

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Ellie Mesler spends much of her life trying to kill bacteria. She also devotes a good deal of time and energy to nurturing bacteria to make cheese.

Mesler, 60, is a pharmacist at Fletcher Allen Health Care. She is cheese maker at home, where she makes goat cheese from the milk of animals in her backyard barn.

“If you want to make cheese that’s worth eating, you make a chevre,” Mesler said. “Because when you’re done, it’s the best cheese you’ve ever tasted.”

Preparing the starter for the cheese takes about an hour, Mesler said. Chevre, a soft goat cheese, requires minimal aging. Mesler eats her chevre, plain or flavored with herbs, four days after she adds culture, rennet and salt to fresh goats’ milk she pasteurizes and cooks on her kitchen stove. The cheese, stored in a cool place, is ready to eat 12 to 16 hours after it’s prepared. But a few days aging — and turning and salting in 12-hour intervals — adds form and flavor to the cheese, she said. Herbs of choice are sprinkled on top of the rounds as desired.

Mesler’s background and experience in science — chemistry, biology, precision, results — figure into her cheese making. But more important to the goat-to-table process is a kind of “gray” zone, apart from the right or wrong of evidence-based science, where earth and animals and taste and texture come together, Mesler suggests. It is this quality of cheese making that holds strong appeal and meaning for Mesler, she said.

“As a scientist, things are black and white — proven or not,” she said. “The way that you become a human being, it’s always shades of gray. Because in the real world, nothing is black and white.”

This kind of discovery was made through cheese making when Mesler went to Bread and Butter Farm in Shelburne to buy raw cow’s milk to make cheese. One of the farmers said to Mesler: “You do the easy thing. You go pick up your milk,” she recalled.

The remark was a kind of revelation for her and she thought: He’s right. I’m the consumer.

“I have no clue what went into that stainless steel pail,” she said. “After he said that to me, I thought: ‘I really need to understand pre-stainless steel pail.’”

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Mesler started to milk goats and came to this understanding: “It was the magic,” she said. “It was a connection not just to the food, but to the earth. It was a magical moment.”

Her move in this direction came after a diagnosis in June 2007 of pancreatic cancer.

“Cooking became something very simple,” Mesler said. “If you have potatoes, you eat potatoes. I made a true commitment to eating what I could make and what was grown locally.”

The illness, from which she has recovered, became a catalyst from re-evaluating priorities and commitments, Mesler said. “When I got sick it was a little wake-up call that your job isn’t the alpha and omega,” Mesler said. “There was always something missing.”

Cheese making, with its “ying-yang” relation to her profession through the role of bacteria, has become a means to filling that gap. The process fits well with her work schedule. The cheese feeds Mesler and her husband, Mark, a medical sociologist, and family friends. With the goats, it is a bond between Mesler and her neighbor, Christine McMillian, Mesler said.

Four years ago, taking a walk in South Hero, where the Meslers used to live, she met McMillian, who was out walking with her baby. The two women started talking, and struck up a friendship. McMillian milked goats in Milton, where she lives, and gave goat’s milk to Mesler.

“I made cheese immediately,” Mesler said. “With that first gallon.”

Last August, the Meslers moved from South Hero to Milton, to a house and barn on 10 acres that borders a preserve. The house is next door to McMillian and her family — an arrangement that amounts to a “free-flowing space” among and between the two families.

The goats live in a barn at Mesler’s house. Together, the women care for the animals, milking five goats that produce about two gallons of milk per day, Mesler said.

Mesler makes chevre once a week. Six gallons of milk produces eight rounds of chevre, five ounces apiece. Twice a month, Mesler makes a hard cheese – a product that ages in her basement for about four months. At the moment, she is aging a big round of gouda with stinging nettle; it will be wrapped in a mold of melted wax.

Mesler has taken eight cheese-making classes at the Vermont Institute of Artisan Cheese, and is a big fan of a book by Margaret Peters-Morris, “The Cheesemaker’s Manual.”

The satisfaction is immense, said Mesler, who hasn’t purchased cheese in more than a year. She has plenty to give to friends, and uses chevre for cooking, for salads, for eating with bread.